Enterprise applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM applications, ase generally known. CRM is an approach to managing various aspects of interaction a company has with its customer, such as sales—or service—related interactions. The general aim of CRM is to assist the company in building lasting customer relationships and customer loyalty.
Given the competitive nature of most industries, many companies turn to CRM systems with the aim of improving customer satisfaction and maximizing profits. Many CRM systems available today provide both sales and service functionality, including account, contact, opportunity management, and call center capabilities such as case tracking and knowledge base. These CRM systems allow their users to enter information related to activities into a database so that the activities can be tracked in an attempt to resolve the activity in an automated fashion.
Examples of these activities include preparing for a sales meeting or demonstration, responding to a request for proposal (RFP), resolution of a complex service request, performing creative design for a marketing campaign, and the like. While the CRM systems provide for the logging of these tasks as activities with an assigned due date and status so that they may be tracked, the actual work to complete these activities is typically handled in unstructured communications conducted in meetings, over the phone, via email, etc.; typically these CRM systems do not provide their users the ability to conduct the communications that are required to complete the activities. Thus, what typically ends up happening is that, when an activity is initially identified, it is recorded in the CRM system so that the activity can be tracked. However, the actual work to complete the activity is conducted outside of the CRM system, since the CRM systems do not provide a platform for conducting the necessary communications. When the activity is completed, the user marks the activity as “completed” in the CRM system.
It would be desirable to have a CRM system that integrates the traditional tracking and management functionality of CRM with collaboration functionality in order to manage the unstructured collaborative activity that is commonly conducted in completing the activities.